Trump administration to send only partial food stamp payments this month

The long line outside a charity food pantry in the Bronx on Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025. The fate of SNAP, the nation’s largest anti-hunger program, has been up in the air as the government shutdown continues. (Marco Postigo Storel/The New York Times)

By TONY ROMM

The Trump administration will send partial payments this month to the roughly 42 million Americans who receive food stamps, offering only a temporary and limited reprieve to low-income families as the federal shutdown approaches its sixth week.

The government revealed its plans in a set of court filings Monday, just days after two judges found fault in the administration’s initial refusal to fund those benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, starting this month.

But the roughly 1 in 8 families that receive SNAP may still be at risk of imminent hunger and financial hardship. The Trump administration opted against using its full stable of available funds — totaling into the billions of dollars — to sustain the nation’s largest anti-hunger program. As a result, eligible households may receive only half as much in benefits compared with their usual amounts, officials said.

It also remained unclear when food stamp recipients would actually receive their aid. The Trump administration had previously warned that it could take weeks to provision benefits on a partial basis, further underscoring the consequences of its budgetary decision Monday.

Many Democrats sharply condemned the White House in response, saying the administration had a legal and moral obligation to pay full benefits on time, especially given the fact that there were plenty of available funds.

“It is not enough to do the bare minimum — the administration should stop playing politics with hunger and use all available resources to ensure Americans can put food on the table,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who leads her party on the chamber’s top agriculture panel.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

“There’s a process that has to be followed,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNN on Sunday. “So, we got to figure out what the process is. President Trump wants to make sure that people get their food benefits.”

For the millions of poor Americans who depend on SNAP, the whiplash has only compounded the real, financial consequences from a shutdown that has no end in sight. Still, President Donald Trump has made no real effort to negotiate an end to the fiscal stalemate roiling Washington, where Democrats refuse to back a Republican measure to reopen the government because it does not extend a set of subsidies that help Americans afford health insurance.

The saga began last week, when the Trump administration said it would not tap billions of dollars that it had in reserve to continue funding nutrition benefits into this month, in a break with its own prior, public guidance. The move defied calls from congressional Democrats and Republicans alike, who wanted to see the White House protect the poor in the event that the shutdown continued for weeks longer.

The decision prompted cities, states, religious groups and nonprofits to sue, as they looked to spare low-income families from experiencing hunger for as long as the government remained closed. Two different federal courts ultimately sided with those groups Friday, and the judges imposed a deadline of Monday for the Trump administration to communicate its next steps.

Only one of the judges, John J. McConnell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, explicitly ordered the Trump administration to restart SNAP payments immediately. In a written order, issued Saturday, he said the Agriculture Department could either make full payments to SNAP recipients by Monday, or partial payments by Wednesday.

McConnell gave the government those extra days after administration officials told the court that providing partial payments could take weeks in some cases because of technical constraints. In doing so, he encouraged the Trump administration to fund payments in full using a second account at the Agriculture Department, one comprised largely of tariff revenues.

Responding Monday, the Trump administration maintained that it could not legally source SNAP payments this way, even though it had tapped the money repeatedly to sustain another federal nutrition program during the shutdown. In a sworn declaration, Patrick A. Penn, a top official at the Agriculture Department, added that using the money to provide full food stamp aid would also “stray from congressional intent.”

The assertion offered a stark contrast with the myriad other ways in which Trump has reprogrammed the budget during the shutdown to blunt some of its potential consequences. But SNAP is a function of government that Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have long aspired to cut and restrict, and one that Trump himself has associated with Democrats, whom he promised to punish as a result of the federal closure.

Anti-hunger groups broadly condemned the White House for opting to release only partial benefits. Crystal FitzSimons, the president of the Food Research & Action Center, said the decision would force “state agencies to scramble under unclear guidance, which will further delay benefits.”

But signs quickly emerged that the fight might not be over.

Skye Perryman, the president of Democracy Forward, which represented cities and nonprofits that had sued, said the group was “considering all legal options to secure payment of full funds.”

“It shouldn’t take a court order to force our president to provide essential nutrition that Congress has made clear needs to be provided,” she added in a statement.